Despite my reservations about the matter, I opted to add Best Offer to virtually all my listings before Christmas to stimulate dismal sales performance. I'm pleased to report it helped stimulate sales as I hoped it would.
Here are my thoughts. Please bear in mind I'm not claiming to have run any tests, experiments or drawn conclusions. These are my thoughts only, offered for discussion or your general entertainment.
- Certain buyers really like Best Offer. (Duh.) Others will skip it just to make their purchase and go. They don't want to wait around and fuss back-and-forth with asking price.
- Almost 80 per cent of buyers will offer half the asking price or less regardless of the item being already substantially marked down or not.
- A seller really has to 'get over' the people who think it's totally cool to make an offer of $5 on an item selling for $100. Thick skin helps. I am learning to stifle the swear words that bubble forth when this happens. It is a work in progress. Decline decline decline.
- Some would-be buyers cannot take 'no' for an answer and if you add Auto-Decline to that listing, will find a similar one of yours and keep offering less than you'd dream of accepting.
- Expect at least a few rude messages when you decline those crazy lowball offers. It's best not to engage those people. Move on, eyerolling optional.
- Changing your handling time will wipe away all your Auto-Decline and Auto-Accept settings for no good reason. Still. I found this during the summer and reported it as a bug and it hasn't been fixed yet.
- Many Canadian buyers have zero concept of the cost of included postage in an asking price and will happily offer a seller $10 for an item with included postage when postage to their postal code alone will cost $15. That, or they think the Canada Post Fairy has been along and that shipping really is magically free. And that the Shopping Fairy made the item free too while the giveaways were going around.
- Less than two per cent of my buyers will entertain a counter-offer. They either want it for the lowball offer they submit or they don't. There is no negotiating. Most counteroffers will be ignored. A vast majority will be promptly declined and no more offers forthcoming.
- The 'blocked buyer' list is a seller's best friend. I see something of a correlation between Best Offer buyers and a lot of nasty Feedback Left For Others that would concern any seller.
I decided early that if the Best Offer is even remotely close to what I might consider the very lowest end of acceptable if I were absolutely desperate, it's take it or leave it. At least in my sector of sales, there is little point to a counteroffer, it only prolongs the process and ties up what you can revise in a listings while the buyer lets the counteroffer time-out without responding.
Thoughts?
